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Fatma Müge Göçek, "Recovering Colors from a Whitewashed Past: Evidence of the 1915 Armenian Ethnic Cleansing in Contemporary Turkey"

The irony in the title is intentional in that finding evidence in contemporary Turkey today for the Armenian ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1915 is like searching for colors on a whitewashed wall. And that is exactly why a scholar needs to expand the conception of archives and evidence to bring in new bases of knowledge and to think about and interpret absences and silences. In this talk, I explore how scholars negotiate the informal cultural landscape filled with oral histories and musical laments as well as the official landscape containing approximately 250 million documents in the official Ottoman imperial archives carefully cataloged by the Turkish state to recover those colors.


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Verne Harris, "Ethics at the Endgame: Archives and Justice in South African Contexts"

Verne Harris explores concepts named in and themes suggested by the conference title. He draws on a body of work fashioned by experience of the post-apartheid transformation of archives in South Africa, and framed by long engagement with Derridean deconstruction. He points toward what he calls an ethics of hospitality. This ethics, he insists, must take account of and speak to what Derrida calls "a certain capitalistico-techno-mediatic hegemony".


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Barbara Madison, "Seeking Native Documents: Institutional Challenges of Anishinaabeg Research"

Great Aunt Mary says we have Indians in our family tree. Do records exist that could be researched? A college student is assigned to write a paper on an Ottawa Indian Chief. What types of records would an archivist or librarian suggest? A newspaper reporter decides to write a story about a local tribe or band. What records are available that the reporter might use to find background information? Some members of the local tribe want to locate records that will help substantiate their DIB (Degree of Indian Blood). Are there any records that would help?
Researching Native documents is difficult for those experienced in the field and extremely overwhelming for the inexperienced. This presentation will discuss the types of primary & secondary Indian records that do exist and the types of records that do not exist. Do the existing records actually help or hinder the researcher?
A special focus will be placed on Native Oral History, both formal and informal, with emphasis on what has been accomplished in Michigan and how it may or may not help fill in the gaps of the primary & secondary materials available to researchers. Most important, are we as the holders and experienced users of these documents being effective in helping the researcher seeking Native records? Are institutions doing enough to collect information for the future? We will examine some ways the holders can be more effective in helping the researcher as well as some ways to add material to their collections.


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Noel Solani, "Before Polokwane when Nelson Mandela was President: Collecting Robben Island Prisoner Memories"

The historical wealth of all modern societies by which knowledge is produced and reproduced takes the form of collection of information in order to conserve it for the next generation. The primary goal of collecting such information is to satisfy human curiosity about the past. This information, whether in the form of objects, paper, video or audio, becomes useful as far as it could be defined as historical evidence and outside that paradigm it has no use value.
In South Africa, the 1990s were regarded as historical in the sense that Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were released from prison. Those that were in exile returned home without fear of being persecuted as the result of the agreements between the government and the liberation movement. While there was this excitement, archivists and historians realised that information that was in state possession could prove critically important in a post apartheid South Africa. Conferences and symposia were held to discuss and debate the state of archives in South Africa. At the same time rumours were spreading that the state was burning some of the critical evidence that may be required in a liberated South Africa to prove the brutality of the regime.
Also at this time, institutions such as the University of Fort Hare, University of the Western Cape, Witwatersrand University etc. were contesting to house the archives of the liberation movement. They did so because history had proved that in all post independent states in Africa such material as generated by the long struggles of the masses and their organisations has use value among researchers and academics. This climate of wanting to acquire material of the liberation struggle continued well into the late 1990s when Robben Island Museum was formed in 1997. On its formation, the Island sought to collect information on a project it christened “memory project” where it collected through audio and visual recording the stories of former Robben Island Prison memories.
This paper is a critical analysis of the dynamics that prevailed in the collection of such memories, in their use and use value especially in a period where many of the political prisoners were unemployed and in an environment where some researchers mainly from outside South Africa were prepared to pay interviewees for the information they provided. Juxtaposed with this was that the museum had no clear policies as to whether the museum researchers were allowed to pay for interviews. Best practice by South African researchers at this time was not to buy interviewees. In short, this paper is an analysis of collecting and archiving information in a policy vacuum by the state and by the institution and the ethics that influence such collecting.


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James Steward "University of Michigan Nazi- Era Provenance Research Project"

The challenges, mysteries, and ethics of art provenance have been the focus of rampant media attention in recent years, ranging from claims made by the Italian and Greek governments for Mediterranean antiquities held in U.S. public and private collections, to recent raids on four California museums relating to recently imported works of art from southeast Asia, to longstanding concerns for the provenance of works of art seized by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Cultural institutions themselves have often been at odds with each other about appropriate attitudes toward and actions relating to the ethics of owning cultural property: for example, the Archaeological Institute of America has often demanded a different (arguably higher) standard of ethical practice than has been advocated by some of the country's leading art museums. Some museums and collectors have been slow to respond to these concerns for both reasonable and perhaps debatable considerations.
Relative to the legal and ethical considerations of collecting, Nazi-era provenance issues have received perhaps the most sustained attention in recent decades. The scale of plundering that took place under the Nazi regime, the difficulties of returning cultural property in the chaotic aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, the difficulty of establishing legal claims to ownership, and the reluctance of some collectors to give up works they argue were legally acquired have conspired against a straightforward story—as indeed have the moral dimensions of the Holocaust and of Nazi plunder. American museums are, however, being required to adhere to a more rigorous standard of investigation, the fruit of decades of effort by advocates within the international Jewish community and of mandates passed by the American Association of Museums in 1999 and 2001.
The University of Michigan recently completed a multi-year Nazi-era provenance research project led by its Museum of Art. I will present here the process established by the Museum to investigate not only its own collections but other potentially at-risk collections at the University, as well as the findings of this research project (posted to the AAM's Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal). Further, using this experience as a guide, I will propose a higher standard for ethical practice in the area of provenance generally, identifying a few particularly at-risk areas of collecting practice. Ultimately, I will suggest that maintaining public trust in our cultural institutions--working from a core understanding of the role of objects in shaping cultural memory--demands a higher standard, and that the burden for leadership in this area may fall on our universities.


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Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen & Dylan Yeats, "Reviving 'Yellow Peril': Re-Membering a Disappeared Archive of the American Empire"

"Yellow peril" has dropped out of U.S. usage as an everyday term and as an archival category. And yet U.S. and European political interests and powerful sectors of their political cultures still effectively evoke these fears and these practices. Islamophobia and lurking anti-Chinese fears define much of contemporary U.S. political policy at the same time the U.S. is being reimagined as a "creative" and information-driven "clean" economy. The ideologies of these republican democracies driven by commercial desires and "common sense" profess a neoliberal "color blindness." Yet, the scapegoat culture prevails. This talk will explore the conceptual framing of our efforts to resurface the repressed and "forgotten" historic "yellow peril" (and related "turban tide") archive. We are editing a reader where cultural productions of "yellow peril" can be critically analyzed anew. Such a project offers a means to further decolonize knowledge production by exposing the processes and possibilities of archivalization in shaping our political and social imaginaries.


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Gudmund Valderhaug, "Memory, Justice and the Public Record"

When the Nazi occupation ended in May 1945, there were approximately 10,000 children with Norwegian mothers and German fathers in Norway. Commonly seen as “the enemy’s offspring,” the “War Children” were victimized by society in the years following the Nazi capitulation.
The War Children’s fate did not become a topic of public debate until the 1990s, when accusations of maltreatment and harassment were made public. A research project organised by the Norwegian Research Council in 1998 concluded that this was right; as a group the War Children had been harassed and illegally deprived of some of their civilian rights between 1945 and 1955.
As late as 2006, Norwegian parliament approved a special reparation system for the War Children who had experienced “grave suffering, loss or damage,” in which the size of the compensation should be made dependent on the documentation – in the form of public records – that each individual might bring forth. After two years of this system’s functioning, it is evident that only a small percentage of the War Children have been able to produce the necessary evidence.
The main reason for this is that the War Children’s individual histories are poorly documented in public records. Such exclusions and marginalization are common in recordmaking, and this example will be analyzed in my paper. Furthermore, I will explore why the War Children Reparation System privileges public records as evidence and disregards collective and personal memories. Finally, I will suggest that a real social justice for the War Children will depend on to what extent their histories will be included in the societal archive, and discuss the roles that archivists – and other memory workers – may have in this regard.


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Frank H. Wu, "“It’s Not Fair:” The Life and Death of Vincent Chin and the Motor City"

Frank H. Wu, Dean of Wayne State University Law School, will discuss the Vincent Chin case, the story of a brutal killing of an individual, which became a cause uniting Asian Americans who had not thought they had common interests as well as a symbol for a city and an era. In 1982 outside Detroit, Vincent Chin, a 27 year-old Chinese American celebrating his upcoming wedding, was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white individuals, a father and a stepson, who apparently blamed him for the success of Japanese car companies and their own financial woes. Subsequently, the killers accepted a plea bargain and were sentenced to probation and a $3000 fine. Occurring at the height of “Japan-bashing,” the Chin case presents an opportunity to consider so much more: principally the city of Detroit as an epic example of industrialization and deindustrialization, a magnificent metropolis built by the promise of Henry Ford and the success of the labor movement, united in the building of the iconic American product, the automobile, with its gas-guzzling V-8, which was then wrecked by the very car culture it had created. The nation had been confident in the perpetual superiority of American iron. Yet highways enabled suburban sprawl and white flight. After riots in 1967 and the oil embargo of the early 1970s, the Motor City quickly became the leading example of urban decay as well as an object lesson in the human costs of global competition. As everyone who could afford to do so crossed 8 Mile Road, the literal end of Detroit, they left behind an abandoned shell of boarded-up storefronts, arson-charred houses, and vacant lots turning back into countryside, which would be resented by the surrounding communities even as it was mocked in popular culture. At the heart of the subsequent federal civil rights prosecutions were the witness interviews conducted by activists, showing the racial prejudice that motivated the killers, but which influenced their testimony improperly, according to the defense lawyers. Oral history made and unmade the legal case.